Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Mother of Perfection

Is your child a perfect angel?

Has he lived his entire life without making a single bad choice?

Did he come out of the womb saying "Please" and "Thank you" and "Of course I'll share with you!!"?

If you are nodding in agreement, lucky you! You have been blessed with a perfect child just like mine! I mean, my child would never chuck a fork at his brother's head or whack him in the face with a plastic baseball bat, let alone do both in the same day. Never, never, never.

Nope, my kid is a perfect angel.

When he was two he never tested out his chompers on any of the kids in nursery class. He never hit anyone who had a toy he wanted to play with. He never threw rocks at someone's head or played in the toilet when he was supposed to be napping. He never screamed in my face or refused to eat his peas. Now he is six years old, and yet he has still never broken a toy, told a lie, yelled "I hate you!" or stolen a cookie out of his sister's cup. And he has certainly never said a bad word, called someone a name, pushed someone down, or purposely popped his brother's birthday balloon. Nope. Perfect angel.

So you can understand why I'd be upset if your abnormal child did any of those abnormal things, especially to my innocent little angel. And you'll also understand why I would hop onto Facebook and make judgmental, passive-aggressive comments about what a horrible mother you must be for raising such a menace to society. My friends will rally around me in a sympathetic show of solidarity -- after all, only a terrible mother would produce a child who would do such awful things -- and you deserve to feel humiliated by all of the people who care about me.

They say there are two sides to every story, but when one of those sides is perfection, it's obvious where the problem is. So there is no need to discuss it privately. I am actually doing you a favor by letting others know to expect failures from you and your child. That way they won't be caught by surprise when your child does something abnormal again.

And don't worry, perhaps someday you will be as perfect as I am and then God will see fit to bless you with a perfect child. You'll understand if I'm not sympathetic until then, won't you?

After all, it's just so hard for me to relate to you, with me being so perfect and all...